Abstract
NEARLY all personal injury cases in the United States are taken on a contingency basis by plaintiff's lawyer.' Contingent fees are attractive to plaintiffs because they bear little financial risk of filing a lawsuit. As a result, critics see them as invitations to frivolous suits. However, there exists little theoretical or empirical evidence for this claim. The purpose of this article is to provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the effect of contingent fees on the extent of frivolous litigation. An abundant literature on contingent fees exists, most of which has focused on the incentives they create for lawyers to act in the best interest of their clients.2 Several authors have also commented on the issue of excessive litigation, but only a few have examined it in detail.3 Those
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